But most of the noels--_nouve_, they are called in Provencal--are purely imaginative: quaintly innocent stories created by the poets, or taken from those apocryphal scriptures in which the simple-minded faithful of Patristic times built up a warmly coloured legend of the Virgin's life and of the birth and childhood of her Son. Sometimes, even, the writers stray away entirely from a religious base and produce mere roistering catches or topical songs. Such are those Marseille noels which are nothing more than Pantagruelian lists of succulent dishes proper to Christmas time--frankly ending, in one case, with the materialistic query: "What do I care for the future, now that my belly is well lined?" It was against such "bacchanals of noel" that the worthy Father Cotton preached in Marseille in the year 1602: but the flesh and the devil always have had things pretty much their own way in that gay city, and he preached in vain. And at Aix-en-Provence the most popular noel of all that were sung in the cathedral was a satirical review of the events of the year: that as time went on grew to be more and more of a scandal, until at last the Bishop had to put a stop to it in the year 1653. The Provencaux have been writing noels for more than four hundred years. One of the oldest belongs to the first half of the fifteenth century and is ascribed to Raimond Feraud; the latest are of our own day--by Roumanille, Crousillat, Mistral, Girard, Gras, and a score more. But only a few have been written to live. The memory of many once-famous noel-writers is preserved now either mainly or wholly by a single song. Thus the Chanoine Puech, who died at Aix almost two hundred and fifty years ago, lives in the noel of the Christ-Child and the three gypsy fortune-tellers--which he stole, I am sorry to say, from Lope de Vega. The Abbe Doumergue, of Aramon, who flourished at about the same period, is alive because of his "March of the Kings": that has come ringing down through the ages set to Lulli's magnificent "March of Turenne"; and it is interesting to note that Lulli is said to have found his noble motive in a Provencal air. Antoine Peyrol, who lived only a little more than a century ago, and who "in our good city of Avignon was a carpenter and wood-seller and a simple-hearted singer of Bethlehem" (as Roumanille puts it) has fared better, more than a dozen of his noels surviving to be sung each year when "the nougat bells" (as they call the Christmas chimes in Avignon) are ringing in his native town. And, on the other hand, as though to strike a balance between fame and forgottenness, there are some widely popular noels--as "C'est le bon lever"--of which the authorship absolutely is unknown; while there are still others--as the charming "Wild Nightingale"--which belong to no one author, but have been built up by unknown farm-house poets who have added fresh verses and so have passed on the amended song.